Hand Painted Zine, Part 4
I've been playing a lot with these kind of M.C. Escher style morphing patterns and I wanted to incorporate them in an Illustration.
It's very tempting to try and copy Escher's work (and also very difficult 😅) so i wanted to ground my first attempt on something I had done before. On the previous installment of this zine series I documented the way in which I used an isometric grid to draw the shapes and the patterns. So this time I thought I would use a slightly "twisted" version of the grid to dictate the morphing of the image. Let me explain.
This is what a common isometric grid looks like:
And this is what it looks like if you progressively turn the sides of each triangle from a straight line into and arc:
It's a bit easier to see when animated:
The base i used for my drawing changes vertically from bottom to top, so it starts as a straightforward pattern of triangles and turns into some swirly pinwheels:
I used this base to sketch my basic structure. It starts with a conventional base a the bottom but it twists and turns as it grows following the curvier lines towards the top. Here is a side by side comparison:
Then I wanted to add some decorative elements to highlight the underlying pattern, but it felt like the triangles and pinwheels where not enough, so i added a secondary, but related, pattern of hexagons on top of the existing one. It's perhaps a little hard to read but it looks like this:
This allowed me to add more variety to the decorative elements and still draw attention to the morphing of the pattern:
I thought it would be interesting to also draw the eye to the progression by drawing the hexagon that turns into a circle on the right hand side (drawn in red).
And to add a final touch to the sketch I thought a swirling snake around the building would make things more interesting by breaking the vertical direction of movement:
After transferring the sketch to watercolor paper I had a nice few hours of adding color, this is the final result:
Anyway, I hope you like the image and the breakdown of the process.
Thanks for following along!
Federico